Philippe Ariès, 16 October 1980

“... freedom to act as they liked – a mixture which will come as no surprise to such historians as Richard Cobb or Eric Hobsbawm. I am very much afraid that my friend Peter Laslett’s hair will stand on end when he finds out what his carefully swaddled infant has become in my uncouth hands. I must therefore warn my readers that any resemblance between the ...”

Christopher Tayler: Francis Spufford, 5 October 2016

“... Plenty, 2010). He has also published Unapologetic (2012), an Anglican riposte to the likes of Richard Dawkins that’s subtitled ‘Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.’ Backroom Boys is billed as a ‘love letter to quiet men in pullovers’, and Spufford often seems to focus on socially or technically ...”

Philip Booth, 20 July 1995

“... died before he could finish the book, but the revision was more or less complete. Peter Burton and Richard Smith have added chapters on film, the gay scene and rock music, for which Baker had left notes. The result is not just about drag, nor yet about female impersonation, and doesn’t even confine itself to the performing arts. Besides the contemporary ...”

“... In the same year that the Kitchen Sink artists were honoured in Venice, one of them – Jack Smith – won first prize at the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool, with his Creation and Crucifixion. Thanks to these successes, 1956 could be said to have marked the apotheosis of realism; it was also the year that the death-blow was delivered to the movement ...”

Richard Fortey: William Smith, 9 August 2001

“... strata in sequence. Once again, a map provided the key; it was published by the surveyor William Smith in August 1815 and it provided the framework for the geological time-scale that is still in use today. In turn, this supplied the millions of years required for the operation of organic evolution. A mere map became the catalyst that destroyed Biblical ...”

“... is to see the world from the aspect of eternity, and to achieve the intellectual love of God. As Richard Mason reminds us, Spinoza’s neglect of epistemology made him of little interest to those who insisted that the problem of knowledge as set out by Descartes defined what philosophy was properly about. Spinoza found a little room for that problem only at ...”

Hal Foster: David Smith, 9 March 2006

“... David Smith is often seen as the Jackson Pollock of modern sculpture, the artist who transformed European innovations (in welded steel above all) into an American idiom of expanded scale and expressive power. Like most legends in art history, this isn’t false, despite the immediate catch that his greatest follower, Anthony Caro, is English ...”

Richard Fortey: The Beginnings of Geology, 9 February 2006

“... ensured that the wider world appreciated his message. Not long afterwards, William ‘Strata’ Smith produced the first good geological map, using characteristic fossils as guides to rock formations. After some difficulties in getting the map published, largely because this honest yeoman tangled with the toffs at the Geological Society, ...”

Martin Seymour-Smith, 9 October 1986

“... volume of a projected three-volume ‘definitive’ biography of Robert Graves by his nephew, Richard Perceval Graves. It takes over where the author’s father, Robert’s younger brother John Graves, left off. John, who died in 1980, had been described by Robert as a ‘typically good pupil of a typically good school’ (to which he returned as ...”

William Davies: Irrationality and its Other, 5 December 2019

“... the only ones hungry for these insights. The popularisation of behavioural economics was led by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge (2008), which inspired the setting-up of ‘behavioural insights’ teams in governments around the world (with Cameron’s coalition government at the forefront), and has nurtured a view of policy that is attentive ...”

Richard Fortey: Noah’s Flood, 1 July 1999

“... of Bulgaria and Dalmatia? Legends of a great flood permeated many traditions. In 1876, George Smith published his translations of the cuneiform writing preserved on baked-clay tablets from Mesopotamia – which recorded what we now call the Epic of Gilgamesh. These fragments from the great library of Nineveh spoke, in a language known as Akkadian, of a ...”

Richard Davenport-Hines, 16 March 2000

“... of pater estquem nuptiæ demonstrant; his consequent misfortunes involve him with a villain called Richard Craufurd, whom Bulwer-Lytton based on the banker Henry Fauntleroy, who had been hanged for forgery before a crowd of 100,000 people at Newgate in 1824. The central male figure in Lucretia is an artist, murderer and forger called Gabriel Varney, who was ...”

Richard Jenkyns: George Grote’s ‘A History of Greece’, 9 August 2001

“... died a week after birth. The sight of Mrs Grote in a turban is supposed to have provoked Sydney Smith to the comment that at last he understood the meaning of the word ‘grotesque’, but she seems to have been an admirable person, and the memoir of her husband that she compiled as a dutiful widow is the best source for his life. He did not have to worry ...”

Frank Kermode: Being in New York, 7 July 1983

“... Tony Smith, reviewing J.K. Oates’s Penguin on herpes (LRB, Vol. 5, No 9), sounded, thank God, a cheerful rather than a holy note. Far from being a divine visitation on lechery, herpes is a manageable minor affliction. It may, however, be easier for the righteous to approve, and more difficult for doctors to demythologise, the condition Dr Smith called ‘the gay compromise syndrome’, better-known as AIDS ...”